“Frog and Toad”: An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love
A series of illustrated children’s books endures as a classic. Was it also the author’s attempt to come out? {read}
The rise of Indigenous horror: How a fiction genre is confronting a monstrous reality
Indigenous writers, on the other hand, acknowledge the mundane horror of living in a country that dehumanizes you, weaving the reality of Indigenous life with fiction to scare audiences. In…
17 Great Books on the Border to Read Instead of ‘American Dirt’
If you’ve been online in the past few months, you’ve probably seen ads for American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’ heavily promoted new novel about Mexican-American immigration. The book was loftily blurbed…
Whatcha Reading, Michael Hobbes?, by Martin McClellan
Michael Hobbes is a Seattle-based journalist, writer, and supremely-talented untangler of our culture’s messiest cultural hairballs. He is the other half (the first being Sarah Marshall, who did this column…
The Future of Shame and Hope: A Conversation with L.X. Beckett
Not all is bad and terrible and grim in the future. Sometimes disaster means change, and change means growth, and growth means a future full of cool ideas and good-hearted…
Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times
But it is Moby-Dick’s premonitory brilliance that continues to make it relevant. Melville predicts mass extinction and climate breakdown, and foresees a drowned planet from which the whale would “spout…
Ted Chiang Uses Science to Illuminate the Human Condition
I think science and religion could more peacefully coexist if we could agree that they are trying to answer different questions; science is investigating the question, “how does the universe…
The sci-fi of another language
The meaning of science fiction stories are often tough to pin down. Do they depict the future or the present? Are they personal or political? Imaginative or reality-based? Also, is…
Why Are Men So bad at writing sex?
Male authors dominate the Bad Sex in Fiction awards, and it’s no coincidence
Emily Wilson talks about translating ‘The Odyssey’
Maybe now, after all the media coverage of my work, interviewers might finally start asking cisgender men about how gender impacts their work. It would be about time